Andrea Mia Ghez

Born: 1965

Country of Birth: USA

Nationality: USA

Ethnicity: White

MIT BS Physics 1987; California Institute of Technology PhD Physics 1992

""To me, it’s always been very important to encourage young women into the sciences, so to me the Nobel Prize means an opportunity and a responsibility to encourage the next generation of scientists who are passionate about this kind of work into the field. It’s important to have role models." (astro.ucla.edu); "At every stage, someone has always said no, you can’t do this because you’re a girl. I got very used to ignoring when people said I couldn’t do something. There were times when people didn’t believe our approaches would work. I was pretty well trained by then to believe in myself." (astro.ucla.edu); "Spectral imaging allowed us to do the first series of experiments. And, you know, it was the best that could be done at the time. Adaptive optics really transformed our ability to make these kind of measurements," she said. "It's like seeing in black-and-white and going to color. It's so much richer." (investors.com); "With each advance in the technology, we covered things we didn't expect to see. When that happens, it drives the next set of questions." (investors.com); “Hard problems require patience. If it were easy, it would have already been done. Moving the frontier of knowledge forward is just hard work.” (newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine); "I have to say, that’s become one of my favorite sayings—that all challenges can also be opportunities. When I talk to my kids, I say that good faceplants are really important in life. You need to figure out how to get up and figure out what didn’t work, and how you move forward. How do you take whatever you can learn from it, and just keep going? Because that always happens. It doesn’t matter what field you’re in. It doesn’t matter what walk of life you’re from. These things will present as challenges; how do you reposition yourself so that you can make progress?" (news.uchicago.edu); "So my advice is both identify what floats your boat, but keep taking risks to understand how to expand or evolve. Because we keep evolving. You’re continuously in this state of figuring out how you can contribute in an interesting and meaningful way, both in terms of the impact you have and also the fulfillment you feel from doing it. The advice is to keep thinking about that. Don’t get stuck." (news.uchicago,edu); “One of the hardest things and most important decisions we make in grad school is who we work with,” she says. “It becomes important to be in an environment where people think highly of you and where their opinion isn’t complicated by their feelings about women. Picking a good advisor who’s willing to support you in something you’re interested in is really important.” (technologyreview.com); "

— Andrea Mia Ghez

Field of Study: Astrophysics

Institution/Corporation: UCLA

Degrees & Memberships: Honorary Degrees: University of Oxford (2019); Tel Aviv University (2025); Amherst college (2024); Member: St. Anthiony Hall; National Academy of Sciences (2004); American Philosophical Society (2012); American Physical Society (2019); American Astronomical Society (2020); American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2004); Academy of Achievement (2021); Pontifical Academy of Sciences (2024); Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2012)

Awards: 2020 Nobel Prize-Physics with Reinhard Genzel & Roger Penrose; 2025 Rumford Award, American Academy of Arts & Sciences; 2024 Alumni Medal, University of Chicago; 2024 Marty Sklar My Last Lecture Award, UCLA; 2023 Woman of the Year, California Science Center Foundation: 1997-2023 UCLA Outstanding Physics & Astro Teaching Award (8x); 2022 Inst. of Physics (UK Learned Physics Society) Honorary Fellow; 2020 Science & Education Pioneer Award, UCLA; 2019 Teaching Award, UCLA Dept. of Physics & Astronomy; 2017 Sven Berggren Prize, Royal Physiographic Society, Sweden; 2016 Bakerian Medal, The Royal Society of London; 2013 Univ. of Chicago Lab School Distinguished Alumni Award; 2012 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, Royal Swedish Acad. of Sci.; 2012 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award; 2007 UCLA Acad. Adv. Program Faculty Recognition Award; 2006 Aaronson Award, University of Arizona; 2004 Raymond & Beverly Sackler Prize, University of Tel Aviv; 2004 UCLA Gold Shield Prize; 1999 Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award, American Physical Society; 1998 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize, American Astronomical Society; 1996 Packard Fellowship; 1996 Sloan Fellowship; 1994 NSF Young Investigator Award; 2000 named 1 of 20 Promising Young American Scientists in Their Respective Fields, Discover magazine; 1994 Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy; Danny Heineman Prize for Astrophysics;

Achievements: was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of a black hole in the Milky Ways' galactic center; created the UCLA Galactic Center Group to coordinate research and technical developments; January 2020, her team reported the discovery of a new class of bizarre objects — objects that look like gas and behave like stars — at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole; helped pioneer a powerful technology called adaptive optics, which corrects the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere in real time and opened the center of our galaxy as a laboratory for exploring black holes and their fundamental role in the evolution of the universe; published “You Can Be a Woman Astronomer” in 1995; took the first clear photo of the Milky Way; co-authored the book “The Galactic Center: A Window to the Nuclear Environment of Disk Galaxies;” developed a technique known as speckle imaging, which combines many short exposures from a telescope into a single, crisper image;